Google Maps: New data Rich Dashboard in the LBC

Google over the next 48 hours will be rolling our a new analytic feature for the Local Business Center to all U.S. LBC listings. For the first time users of the Local Business Center will have access to detailed information about how their listing is performing in the Universal Local Results on the main results page and in Google Maps.

John Biundo of Stone Temple has done an excellent job describing the intricacies of the new product in his recent post. Here is a screen shot of the new Local Business Center feature:

The new vies of the LBC will become the primary view for LBC accounts with single listings. It will be presented as a report in List View to those LBC accounts with more than one listing in the account. Initially it is only available to US users with international rollout time frames to be determined. Of interest is the new Business Listing Guidelines are prominently displayed.

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12 thoughts on “Google Maps: New data Rich Dashboard in the LBC”

Hey Mike, glad to hear someone else is seeing this and writing about it. One thing your screenshot confirms is that the total number of impressions shown in the “Top search queries” (including the top 10 + the “Other”‘s) doesn’t add up to the number of impressions shown in the Totals section.

I wasn’t sure if this was an odd characteristic of my account, but seeing it here, it also doesn’t add up. Not likely a big deal (either a small glitch or something Google may explain (maybe “Others” isn’t all others for some reason), but as analysts, give us an analytical tool and we’re sure to find where the numbers don’t add up!

However, it will highlight the meager click through’s that Map listings often get, but as more businesses claim and improve their listings it should slowly create more trust and adoption in Maps results for general users and then CTRs may slowly improve.

A couple of very small points. We put up a new record for a business in the lbc a few days ago. The business website isn’t up yet. I’ve made searches on google.com. A map with the business and phone number have shown. Its great for me. It creates easy access to the phone number. Despite those views…..the dashboard shows no visits.

How accurate is this thing?

On another business we found some very strange sources of views. I tried a couple of searches….and lo and behold found us at #31 in the local business records for a topic that really has no relevance at all. We don’t want to be in that topic. It has zero relevance.

Doesn’t matter a lot…maybe not at all. But statistics showing that information distort useful information.

This is really a question for Carter and the Google team: How can the categories showing businesses in Maps be cleaned up. In a variety of searches I find businesses totally unrelated to the search query. In fact I find businesses that are closed. In fact they’ve been closed for a long time. In some cases I reported them in google groups forums.

Regardless nonething got done. Is google going to clean up these category listings? How are they going to do this. Is there a verification form? Is there a way to get confirmation on actions.

It is interesting….but with some wierd categories showing for businesses….and businesses populating and being buried in strange categories the statistics can be either distorting or meaninless in some ways.

But it is interesting

(I wish they had put their energies into fixing existing problems rather than creating something new.)

Mike, this reminds of the roll out of Webmaster Tools. Google wanted to know who owned which websites, so they bribed most of us into giving them that info in (in the form of verification files) in exchange for some really cool tools. Now, even many of those who were at first skeptical probably use it regularly.

In my opinion, this is really what the dashboard is all about – a carrot to entice small biz owners and marketing companies to manually go in and claim and verify listings. I see it as an attempt on Google’s part to get help in cleaning up Maps-something we’d all like to see. As a bonus, businesses who verify their listings may get a bit of a boost in the ranking algorithm.